the first coat

The domestic scene here has kept us very busy lately. We arranged to have the worn-down hardwood floors in the main living areas of our home refinished. In the end it will be lovely but it has been an incredible amount of work to remove all the furniture, the art work, the knick-knacks, the plants, and clean out the fridge – like moving house! Fortunately we’ve been able to settle into a space downstairs formerly occupied originally by my late parents. This entailed taking down linens, clothing, kitchen stuff, personal necessities, and computers of course!

A side benefit of all this work has been the clearing out of unnecessary and no longer used stuff, being the packrats we are! (Maybe that’s why many people move every four and a half years?) Once the floors are dry and hardened, we will take advantage of the cleared spaces and having to wash down everything but the floor anyway, by painting the ceilings and walls. So it will be a few weeks before we are back to living in our normal but freshly renewed spaces.

No, dear readers, there’s not much art being done, as usually happens in my summers with their various domestic and holiday distractions. My little studio is also inaccessible beyond those transforming floors, with no room to work in it anyway with the piles of books on the table and other household stuff on the floor! But I still have my Mac and can still blog now and then to satisfy the creative urge!

Yesterday morning I met with friend W. to take slides of some of my past year’s work. Our group had arranged a slide shoot day in early April, setting up professional lights and equipment. Lots of work was shot, but time ran out for a few of us, including yours truly, whose work was there but whose body was in bed with bronchitis.

So today we set up the lights and equipment again but ran into delays searching for missing light reflectors and their connectors for the tripods. Duct tape, as usual, came to the rescue. The setting up and shooting took about two hours for my six pieces; fortunately N. came in right after me to do hers, so the setup time was more worthwhile. Many thanks to W. for his photography expertise and taking time out from his very busy schedule to do this for us!

I learned that our favourite and best film processor who would do slides overnight has gone out of business. Now I wait ’til Monday to see how the the slides turn out. I might still take digital shots of the last three prints at home because the tungsten lights for the slide film produce a brown cast in digital, or I will scan the slides. So, a little more patience before they are uploaded here.

When I got home around noon, I discovered that our internet was down. NO email, no blogging, no browsing; four hours later, ditto. So we called our IP provider who said there were no service interruptions in our area. Checks and restart attempts determined that our modem was not working. Someone would come by the next afternoon (today).

My other half had gone out of town on business earlier in the day. Daughter and I went to our local library to use their computers. I could not access my mail because I could not remember my password for webmail, not having used this service with this account yet! However I got some books and we rented a DVD movie for a mother-daughter night! She missed her IM friends, I missed the blogosphere, but we enjoyed our supper and movie.

This afternoon, our connection is working again, after seemingly a mere tweak by the serviceman. Life is back to normal – or is it?

But what does other-half’s going out of town have to do with any of this? Well, it’s become family history that almost everytime HE goes out of town, something breaks down. When we had babies and diapers, it was the washing machine. Later on, the boiler (for hot-water home heating) would give up on the coldest days of the year, including once or twice with both of us gone leaving the kids with Granny. HE is the fixer-upper, the handyman and the troubleshooter, and HIS machines at the home front miss him, we believe.